Death is not the solution. Death is the problem.
The UN has started the final procedures to put to a vote in front of the General Assembly a resolution for a universal moratorium on the death penalty. While not binding, the adoption of a resolution like this would be a further step towards an understanding how civilization ought to evolve in a complex environment that ill tolerates aggression at any level and from any source. And we should better want to be part of the solution then part of the problem ourselves.
A wonderful video at TED by Steven Pinker, ‘A History Of Violence’, illustrates how fallible we are in our evaluations on how the use violence changed in our societies at all scales. Its dramatic decline is illustrated in Pinker’s talk, and should serve as a guideline to politicians as strong as Moore’s law is to engineers as they stumble towards our shared future.
Then there is Sens, which takes further steps, and boldly declares that the invention of death, attributed to that of sexual reproduction a few billion years ago, is also a mistake, which we must correct.